Review Board 1.6 Release Notes¶

Close Descriptions¶

When closing a review request (discarding or marking as submitted), a description can now be added on the close banner. This works much like a change description for drafts. These can be used to describe why a change was discarded, or what revision it was submitted as, or anything else.

Patch by Hongbin Lu. (Bug #268, Bug #693, Bug #1052)

See the Closing Review Requests documentation for more information.

Collapsible Reviews¶

Older reviews that haven’t been updated since the last time you accessed the review request are now collapsed, letting you focus on the latest discussions taking place.

Collapsed reviews can be expanded by clicking the [+] button.

Patch by Kevin Quinn.

Notification Tab Icons¶

The page icon shown on the tab will now show a green indicator whenever there’s an update notification on the page. This makes it easier to keep track of any changes to review requests when several tabs are open.

Data Loss Prevention¶

It’s harder to lose the changes you make to a review request. We have several safe-guards to keep from accidentally losing work.

• Added error messages when typing an invalid reviewer (user or group). Prior to this, the invalid reviewer would just disappear from the list, leaving no indication that it was wrong.

  Patch by Kevin Quinn.

• Added alerts whenever leaving a page would cause data loss. (Bug #1794)

  Leaving a page while a field or a comment or anything else is being edited will now prompt the user to make them aware they may lose changes. They’ll have an option to leave the page or stay on the page.

• Added confirmation when canceling a field with new changes. (Bug #2096)

• Added a Control-S shortcut to save the field you’re editing.

  Patch by Hongbin Lu. (Bug #2096)

Quick Ship It!¶

A new Ship It! button on the action bar of a review request makes it easier to post new “Ship It!” reviews. It takes only two clicks to post the review. One to click the button, and another to confirm you want to post the review. This greatly speeds up reviews of good changes.

See the Filing “Ship It!”-Only Reviews documentation for more information.

Patch by Kevin Quinn. (Bug #1640)

Issue Tracking¶

Issue tracking provides a new and improved way to mark and reply to defects in a change. When reviewing code, a reviewer can mark a comment as a defect by checking the Open an issue checkbox in a comment dialog. The developer will see that an issue has been filed, and can easily mark it as fixed, or drop it.

This is a faster way to reply to reviews. The developer needs only to click a button to say the issue was fixed, instead of replying with a comment saying it’s fixed.

See the Issue Tracking documentation for more information.

Patch by Mike Conley.

Persistent Draft Banners¶

Review draft banners now stay on screen while the review is shown.

This helps with long reviews when you’ve reached a point where you want to publish the review. You no longer need to scroll up to find the draft banner. It will remain on screen.

Patch by Mark Striemer.

Delete Detection¶

Deleted files in Git and Perforce are now specifically shown as having been deleted in the diff viewer, instead of the entire file being shown in red. In time, we’ll extend this to other types of repositories.

Move/Rename Information¶

The change index and file sections now show when a file has been moved or renamed and what the new name is. Whether or not this is shown depends on the diff and type of repository.

Patch by Colin Caughie.

Private Profiles¶

Added support for private profiles.

On a public Review Board server, users may not want their name and e-mail address to be easily accessed on their profile page or through the API. Users can now go to their My Account page and make their profile private.

When a profile is private, the only users who can see the profile information are the site administrators and the user owning the profile.

Patch by Hongbin Lu. (Bug #2127)

Improved User Pages¶

The user page now shows more information on the user, such as their name, e-mail address, their Gravatar, and what groups they’re a member of. Patch by Kevin Quinn.

User Info Bubbles¶

Hovering the mouse of a user’s name (either on a review or review request) now loads an info bubble showing the user’s name, e-mail address, and Gravatar.

Patch by Kevin Quinn.

Quick search¶

The search field is now always shown, and will search as you type. Unlike the full-text search (which will happen when clicking Search, if full-text search is enabled), this will only search users (by username, first name or last name), groups (group name or display name), or review requests (numeric ID or summary).

See the Quick Search documentation for more information.

Patch by Crystal Lok Koo. (Bug #1842)

Search by Change Number¶

Users can now search for review requests by Perforce change numbers. Note that this may require a full reindex.

Patch by Crystal Lok Koo. (Bug #1508)

New Columns¶

New People and Groups columns were added to the dashboard. These new columns show the individual and group reviewers listed for review requests. They are optional and need to be explicitly added.

Patch by Philipp Henkel.

Color-Coded Labels¶

The “Discarded” and “Submitted” labels in the dashboard views now have their own distinct colors.

Patch by Vlad Filippov. (Bug #1903)

New Clear Case Support¶

Added a brand new Clear Case implementation.

This new implementation is cleaner, more reliable, and fixes many of the problems with the old implementation. Given that this is a complete rewrite, we’d appreciate any bug reports for things that used to work in Review Board 1.5.x.

Patch by Jan Koprowski. (Bug #1375, Bug #1516, Bug #1553, Bug #1588, Bug #1599, Bug #1644, Bug #1727, Bug #1926, Bug #1930, Bug #1931).

Local Site Divisions¶

Review Board now supports managing several virtual instances within a single install, similar to subdirectory installs but as part of a main install’s URL. These would live on, for example, http://reviews.example.com/s/mysitename/, where http://reviews.example.com/ is the main Review Board installation.

These site divisions can all have their own repositories, groups, review requests, users, and administrators. Data within a site division is available only to members of that site. This makes it easy to have, say, a main development Review Board, a contractor Review Board, and a QA Review Board, all separate and locked down, but without having to maintain and upgrade multiple servers.

This isn’t completely put together yet. An administrator on a site doesn’t yet have any UI for putting together a repository or changing any settings, so it still requires a site-wide administrator to set up each site division.

This is an advanced feature and may not work for all use cases yet.

Invite-only Groups¶

Groups can now be marked as invite-only. An invite-only group cannot be viewed by non-members of the group through either the web or the UI.

A review request targeting just invite-only groups cannot be viewed unless the user is either explicitly specified on the review request or they’re a member of at least one of the targeted groups. However, if it also lists any public groups, it will be available to everyone.

Note that users will still be able to see these review requests listed on the “All Review Requests” page, but won’t be able to access them.

See the Invite-only Review Groups documentation for more information.

Hidden Groups¶

Hidden groups are groups that are not shown unless a user is a member or otherwise knows about it (for example, has starred the group, or knows the URL). A hidden group may be invite-only, but it doesn’t have to be.

This allows administrators to deprecate a group or to hide invite-only groups. The group won’t appear in any auto-complete, list, or the API, unless the user is a member of the group.

See the Hidden Review Groups documentation for more information.

Private Repositories¶

Repositories can now be locked down such that only specific users can see the review requests on them. Users can be added to a repository’s user list directly, or indirectly by adding one or more invite-only groups. Note that access control applies to the entire repository, not specific paths within it.

If a user doesn’t have access to a private repository, they won’t be able to see any review requests on it.

See the Private Repositories documentation for more information.

DKIM Support¶

Some spam filters would get caught up on Review Board’s From header forging. The address didn’t actually match the source, causing them to sometimes flag review requests as spam.

We now send e-mails with a Sender header. Servers can use this to find the true sender of the e-mail, instead of assuming it’s the value in From. By default, this is noreply@<domain>, but it can be changed in the admin UI.

This still requires that the sender domain is configured properly for DKIM support.

See the Working with E-Mail documentation for more information.

New User Notifications¶

Added support for e-mailing administrators when new users register.

Administrators can be notified when new users sign up on the Review Board server. This is particularly useful for open source projects.

Patch by Hongbin Lu. (Bug #1081)

Private GitHub Organizations¶

The Repository page in the administration UI now provides a Hosting Service entry for private GitHub Organizations. This differs from the other GitHub entries in that it requires the username used to access files on that repository, rather than assuming the hosting owner account or organization name is used.

Gitorious¶

Gitorious is now a supported hosting service for Review Board, and can be easily configured on the Review Request page.

Patch by Hongbin Lu. (Bug #2053)

HTTP Basic Auth for Git¶

Added support for HTTP Basic Auth for Git repositories when using the web-based raw file URL method.

Private git repositories requiring a username and password through the HTTP Basic Auth mechanism can now be accessed from Review Board. The repository’s username and password are used when accessing the file requires authorization.

Perforce Stunnel¶

Perforce repositories can be secured by using stunnel on the client and server. Review Board now knows how to make use of this. A Perforce repository path beginning with stunnel: will tell Review Board to use stunnel for all communication to that repository.

See the Using Perforce with stunnel documentation for more information.

Plastic SCM support¶

We support connecting to Plastic SCM repositories. Plastic SCM is a new SCM provided by Codice Software. If you have a recent RBTools installed, it will already work with Plastic SCM checkouts. Patch by Dick Porter.